Abstract

This study investigates the main determinants of the psychomotor development among children with neurorisk factors, and aims to identify differences in the psychomotor development over the specific time span. We sampled 150 children with neurorisk factors from the Institution of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation in Banja Luka, Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Our results show that the number of children who meet the age criteria related to the development of gross motor function and oculomotor coordination in the second year of life significantly differs between children at high and at low neurorisk. However, the difference is not significant for the language and socio-emotional development. Specifically, the results of the tasks involving gross motor skills are unstable during their first two years of life. The same applies to oculomotor, language and socio-emotional development. Importantly, among all the children at neurorisk, there was significantly higher number of those who show delays in language and socio-emotional development in their second year of life. In addition to delays in language and socio-emotional development, children at high neurorisk show delays in oculomotor coordination. Furthermore, the number of children who show gross motor delays was significantly lower in their second year of life. There were no statistically significant gender differences given the level of neurorisk and development of certain function. Similarly, there is no significant difference in terms of the level of neurorisk between children from different socio-economic status. However, children from higher socio-economic status families achieve better results in the psychomotor development compared to children of middle and low socio-economic status. Unfortunately, we cannot generalize the results related to differences in psychomotor development of children from different socio-economic status as there was under-representation of children from families of higher socio-economic status. The above stated results about language and socio-emotional development bring into question the general division into children at high and children at low neurorisk levels. Observed instability of results restricts making the forecast on development based solely on an early age results and emphasis the need to monitor children at neurorisk even after gross motor functions are normalized.